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Leftists, eurosceptics, and christian democrats lose support in Europe – ECR up in Finland

Polls from across the EU show declining support for the parties in the the leftist GUE/NGL, the eurosceptic EFDD, and the christian democrat EPP groups of the European Parliament in the past two months. In Finland conservatives are up by 2.3 points .

This analysis is based on 298 polls conducted between January 1 and February 28, 2019. The polls have been gathered by pollofpolls.eu. More about the methodology below.

European United Left-Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) is the group that seems to be taking the biggest hit. It is down by 0.7 points to 7.5 percent.
Here are some of the national parties belonging to GUE/NGL that are particularly losing ground:

United We Can (Spain): -3.7 points to 12.4 percent

The Left (Slovenia): -1.2 points to 8.5 percent

Unsubmissive France (France): -1.2 points to 8.6 percent

Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD) and European People's Party (EPP) are also down in the latest polls by 0.7 and 0.2 points.

The EP group with the biggest increase across the continent is the social democratic S&D. The national parties of this group is up by 0.4 points. These are the national parties of S&D that have made the largest gains:

Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (Spain): +3 points to 26.8 percent

Social Democratic Party of Germany (Germany): +1.9 points to 17.0 percent

Social Democrats (Denmark): +1.4 points to 27.2 percent

Parties that are currently not in the European Parliament and are yet to choose an EP group, are also gaining support, now sitting at 8.1 percent across the union.

Polling support for EU parliament groups at the end of February

EP group

Support

2-month change

ALDE

14.5%

+0.1 points

ECR

8.1%

0 points

EFDD

5.2%

-0.7 points

ENF

8.3%

+0.2 points

EPP

22.7%

-0.2 points

GUE/NGL

7.5%

-0.7 points

Greens/EFA

6.7%

+0.1 points

Non-Inscrits

1.1%

0 points

New or uncategorized

8.1%

+1.1 points

S&D;

17.7%

+0.4 points

One of the big trends we expect to see in the 2018 elections is the rise of populist, nationalist and eurosceptic parties. The three EP groups that can be said to partly or completely fall under this umbrella (ENF, EFDD and ECR) currently poll at 21.7 percent, compared to 9.5 percent in the previous election. Note that Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) was launched in 2015.

Results in 2014 EP election

EP group

Vote share 2014

ALDE

9.3%

ECR

6.4%

EFDD

3.1%

EPP

28.4%

GUE/NGL

7.4%

Greens/EFA

6.4%

Non-Inscrits

6.4%

S&D;

22.5%

The vote shares for the 2014 EU Parliament election have to be taken with a grain of salt. They are computed as a weighted mean of the vote shares of each parliament group in every country. Each country is weighted according to the number of seats in the parliament. In some cases the elected members of a coalition of parties are split into multiple EP groups. In Ireland for example the Independents joined three different parliament groups. In those rare cases we assume each parliament group to have received a third of the votes, as the official results don't include a detailed breakdown.

The numbers don't add up to 100 percent as the votes of non elected parties are not presented.

ECR is gaining support in Finland

In Finland five polls were recorded between January 1 and February 28, 2019. ECR has gained support in the polls, while ALDE, EPP, and GUE/NGL have lost support. The the most recent poll is from February 14, 2019.

About this analysis

This report is based on data collected and aggregated by pollofpolls.eu. pollofpolls.eu is an aggregator of polls from across Europe, affiliated with POLITICO Europe.

pollofpolls.eu use statistical models to compute trend lines for national parties in all EU countries based on local polls. The trend line represent the current likely support of each party.

Except in France, we analyse polls on the national parliament support rather than EU Parliament. National parliament polls are typically conducted more frequently, which we prioritize as we focus on short term trends in this report.

We aggregate the national support for each party to a weighted European mean of each EU parliament group. Each party is weighted based on the number of seats that the country holds in the parliament.

It is worth noting that we don't know for sure what EU parliament groups the national parties will join (if they get any seats). The categorization is done by pollofpolls.eu like this:

The parties that are currently represented in the parliament are assumed to remain in their current groups.

The parties that are not in the parliament, but have been before, are assumed to return to their previous groups.

Parties founded after the previous election in 2014 are categorised as “new” until there is news or an official statement regarding excepted affiliation. This categorization is done manually and may not be fully comprehensive.

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